🗞 What's New: Norway’s startup scene is a hot mess

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Founders are fleeing Norway amid new tax policies.
• OpenAI could be preparing to take on Google Chrome.
• $20M MRR. Wade Foster and his cofounders built the MVP for Zapier at a weekend hack-a-thon.

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A few years ago, Norway’s startup scene was thriving. Oslo was buzzing with grants, venture capital, and ambitious founders. Unicorns like Kahoot, Xeneta, and Oda were proof that big things could happen there. Founders were living the dream...until that dream turned into a nightmare.

Now, everything is falling apart. COVID-19 slowed things down, interest rates rose, and then the government delivered the final blow: Tax policies that made it nearly impossible to build and scale a startup.

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Nobody has really shaken up the consumer browser market since Google released Chrome in 2008. As the go-to software for 65% of internet users, Chrome is the most popular browser in the world.

Could OpenAI have plans to disrupt this market once again? Well, a new report from The Information is claiming exactly that.

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As freelance developers, Wade Foster and Brian Helmig often got paid to build simple integrations between two platforms.

Wade and Brian were based in Columbia, Missouri, and most of their work came from businesses in the city. The needs of these businesses were typically quite basic, and a common type of request was to connect two tools. So, Brian had the idea to build a tool that allowed people to create these integrations without writing any code.

Thus, Zapier was born. Wade and Brian joined up with a third cofounder, Mike Knoop, and built the MVP during a weekend hack-a-thon. They kept plugging away on the beta version for months, working nights and weekends.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Michal Kankowski and Katie Hignett for contributing posts. —Channing